


It's Not All Fine

by pennypaperbrain



Series: Bipolar Sherlock fics [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Friendship, Gen, Gen Work, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a fill for a kinkmeme prompt: <a href="http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/13188.html?thread=74554500#t74554500">How Sherlock copes with being bipolar. Or: five times he does cope and one time he can't</a>. The fill itself is a bit more like ‘Five times Sherlock ignores his bipolar and one time it whaps him so hard he has to take notice.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Not All Fine

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve seen a lot of bipolar!Sherlock prompts on the kinkmeme, but none of them had been filled. So I did one. It’s a subject of personal interest to me and I’m planning to include a bipolar!Sherlock in my next long fic. But that will take a while to brew, and will have plot. This here is a character piece.

1

_High high high_

It’s not drugs any more, not since he turned thirty. This is simply life the way it should be lived.

Sherlock tears along a back street in pursuit of a criminal. John is beside him, and John is laughing too, in as far as he has breath. Sherlock outpaces him, always. But John understands. Sherlock wills him to put on a spurt of speed, and John does it. They are connected.

Above them spring-fresh sky is wheeling, dancing, the clouds themselves reshaping with Sherlock’s thought as the facts of the case slot together in his head. Poison administered through the skin, so ingenious, but not beyond Sherlock’s detection… and the physical world itself acknowledges and applauds. This London alley with its condoms, gum stains, boot-scarred doors, a single dull shuffling pedestrian, is at one with the most exultant music – he will play that music later, on his violin – its bliss filtering into the crannies of the world.

The lone pedestrian has a terminally ill husband. She is in denial about it. It’s a tragedy so piercing sweet that Sherlock wants to stop and shake her into understanding, a single jolt that proves there is really no need to die and yet death is beautiful, Sherlock himself could dive in front of the bus he sees as he emerges into another road, be crushed under its wheels and bleed out on the pavement. Blood and music. Tonight, wine with John and hours and hours of reading.

John’s breath is ragged beside him; somehow he’s caught up. John looks before he crosses the road. Sherlock doesn’t; the bus is gone and there can be no other traffic, and he turns a pirouette in the middle of the street, feeling his coat swirl around him, and John looks at him oddly, dear dull John, but Sherlock has no taste for acknowledging irritation, there is only the thrum of his blood in his veins, of his brain weaving truth from the facts that left the Yarders baffled at the scene behind them – gloves, poison, _of course_ , so simple, the poison was painted inside the victim’s gloves – he is going fast, fast, fast, lighting the world and John is with him and nobody in the world can tear him down. 

_Filter focus exult define deduce on on on_

2

_Fuck fuck fuck_

Sherlock bangs the kitchen chair with his fist because he’s almost there and if his stupid brain would just catch hold of the dangling facts that must connect somehow and not merely jangle and refract random – green of the flask, dust-flecked black of the microscope dial, chill of bare toes on lino – then… what? He rubs his eyes and peers for the nth time at the sample. A half-realisation coalesces: at the crime scene two hairs _there_ , blood on the windowsill, a pattern with meaning, pattern of light on the petri dish, pattern of his flatmate’s slug-slow movements behind him, wiping a plate, deathly somnolent… _This is irrelevant._

He starts. John has placed a mug by his elbow.

‘It’s a cup of tea,’ says John laconically, raising his eyebrows. ‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s a simple Earth beverage. And some of us humans eat, as well. Or, you know, sleep. I’ve heard it helps people think more clearly.’

Sherlock grunts. He has no time for this nonsense, lives may depend on him and even if they didn’t, he wouldn’t fucking care, about any of it. _Work._

‘Don’t need to when I’m working,’ he says, although speaking is a waste of time and he could have solved this case and five others in the time it took John to make that tea if only he could concentrate.

Concentrate. So fucking simple. What is wrong?

Sherlock grips the mug. It’s hot, it burns him, of course. A building shock of pain, wiping out all the crap. Focus, focus. God. Calm, focus. The pain makes him laugh just a little. Sensation, violent sensation, incision, all so good.

John’s still there. Sherlock looks down the microscope; he can tell John is looking at him.

‘If I cannot identify this compound and prove a link to the Greenwich case, John,’ he grates – and yes his voice is grating, even to his own ears, because he is keeping it slow and even, because he can ( _focus!_ ) – ‘The police will have to release Carson, and how many more people do you want him to poison, exactly?’

John goes away. Sherlock is far too busy to be sorry, and he’s certainly not afraid, because why the hell fear anything, and where did _that_ thought come from? _Concentrate._

Two hours later he succeeds in making a match. There is a chemical burn on his arm from where he was unaccountably risibly contemptibly clumsy, and he tells John to fuck off and mind his own business.

3

_No._

The world has broken in the way it does; the way Sherlock always fears. He buries his face in the back of the sofa, but reality presses in: slow evening light and air and musty cloth and stale biscuit crumbs. Data accumulates without end, inescapable and intractable. 

He clutches his head.

‘Sherlock?’ John’s patient, flat voice. ‘Lestrade is on the phone. _My_ phone now. He wants to know if you’ve got anything on Miss C.’

Yes, Carson’s _sister_ was involved. The Yard discovered that, and not Sherlock. That’s fine, as they are occasionally useful for groundwork… but he is meant to take their feeble offerings and convert them to polished gold. He is superhuman so there is no excuse for any lapse. Better not do anything at all.

And why shouldn’t the Carsons kill, if they can be bothered to want to?

Silence. The phone call is over.

‘If I make toast, will you eat it?’ John’s voice again. It is laced with contempt.

Sherlock is a genius. He knows perfectly well that his reason is temporarily affected, and his flatmate’s disdain is imaginary, in spite of the number of times Sherlock’s told him to fuck off recently. He knows that work is his passion and he lives to think. He forces that knowledge to the surface of the mire in his head and by will holds it there as he rolls over on the sofa to look John in the face.

John stares back, curious, small and worried. He can’t see Sherlock fighting himself to a bloody standstill inside his own skull.

There is a switch for times like this, and Sherlock uses it. _This is not so_ , he tells himself.

A glass wall goes up and he is on one side of it and despair is on the other. It howls and gesticulates; he functions

‘Bring me the files,’ he says crisply, sitting up. His voice echoes and cracks in his head; no matter. Willpower has never failed; yet.

Six hours later the case is solved.

4

The next day stretches white. Disconnect.

Sherlock lies limp on the sofa, staring into the room. Data collects in long, blank drifts. Logic curdles into isolate slabs… table… mantelpiece… seated flatmate.

John clears his throat.

‘All right. Either you’re pretending not to notice me pretending to read the paper or you really are out of it. And if that’s happened… well it’s a problem.’

Sherlock considers this. The air gnaws his bones. Disconnect, disconnect. John’s anxious face. _DO SOMETHING._

By some bodily instinct he moves, lurching the few paces to the bathroom. He pisses at length, sparking shreds of will that galvanise him to get back out through the open door, to falter and stand leaning against a kitchen chair…. leaning against a kitchen chair… leaning against a kitchen chair banging his mind against walls because he has nothing to do with reason. Nothing to do. With. Nothing. _MOVE. CAN’T…_ but his head is jerking from side to side. He knows this as he knows sick is broken is shameful wrong unbearable trying to escape the pain.

John beside him.

When Sherlock slumps backwards to crouch against the wall, his limbs fold in and block what they can but he is quite quite aware of John moving down too, looking questions. Some sliver of Sherlock is up and shouting _Bugger off!_ only nothing is, nothing is… his voice is not his and what makes it out is slurred snarled misery ‘Fu-uck.’

The syllable extends as if lazily. Snaps back and slices him through.

‘Well,’ says John. ‘I’m better with problems I can shoot or bandage, but damned if I’m just going to sit and watch you suffer. We both know what this is. And there are medications.’

Sherlock stares at the floor between his ankles. He does know what this is. It is weakness, and impermissible.

_Endure._

Eventually John gets up and goes into the bathroom himself. Sherlock makes it back to the sofa.

_no is yes is equal is death. is not_

5

And one day everything is fine. At four in the morning, Sherlock wakes up after quite a long sleep and wonders about the state of the human scalp he stored in the fridge. Thoughts of futility – _whybother? whycare?_ – buzz around him, but he is able swat them now. There is purpose in the world. His brain hums.

By the time John comes down and falters, looking from the empty, dented sofa to where Sherlock is bending over petri dishes at his desk, several interesting observations about follicle decay have been verified and recorded.

‘Tea?’ John asks.

‘Yes,’ Sherlock replies, delicately squeezing solution out of a pipette. 

John boils the kettle. A minute later, Sherlock registers a mug as it is set carefully at his elbow.

‘Lithium?’ John voice is quiet and calm behind him. ‘Carbamazepine? Lamotrigine? Depakote?’ 

Sherlock freezes. He looks up very slowly, and by the time he’s completed the movement John is around the other side of the table, giving him a doctorish look.

‘Otherwise, it will just come back. These things are cyclical, as well you know,’ John says.

Sherlock studies John’s face. It is furrowed, and his words are serious, but now they have been spoken, they dance away with the tick of the clock. Time is moving lightly again, and Sherlock has things to do.

‘I find sugar suffices in tea,’ he says. 

_On again. On on on_

+1

Six months later, Sherlock stands in a hospital corridor. He’s holding a blister pack, the one John shoved at him after the Carson case was done. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, fine,’ John said. ‘But bloody well take this.’

The unopened packet survived, at the back of his bathroom shelf.

Now his latest case is solved and the world is blooming. He’s alive to his fingertips – and tethered to the horror of John grey-faced and unconscious amid a mass of wires. 

John was knifed yesterday while Sherlock ran ahead.

Sherlock presses a pill out into his hand and stares at it. Just another chemical, and he’s familiar enough with them. It slips down without water; he’s not gone so soft he can’t do that.

A nurse comes out of the operating theatre. Pregnant, diabetic, wearing secrets on her face. Sherlock ignores them.

_despair or redemption or –?_

‘We think he’s stabilised,’ she says.


End file.
